Wants and needs are inseparable from our life as humans. And as we continue to create a world of increasing abundance, the line between wants and needs starts to blur.
Our needs shape our relationships with friends and family. They frame our romantic boundaries. They influence our choices, direct our work, and inform our values.
In short, our needs define us.
If we could pin down a few ‘first principles’ for cities, needs would be somewhere near the top of the list.
Intersecting needs reveal an opportunity—a point of alignment that eventually becomes building blocks for communities, cities, nations, and societies at large.
The more we know our needs and the better we’re able to communicate them, the faster our cities will evolve.
Knowing Your Own Needs
I wipe with 4 squares of 3-ply.
I take 5 ice cubes in my cold brew.
I work on a convertible standing desk.
These are some of my needs at the moment. They could change tomorrow or a year from now. The important part is that I know them.
This dimension of self-awareness hadn’t really hit me until a restaurant manager had pointed it out to me during training…
“You need to ask for what you need,” he said. “But you can’t ask for what you need unless you know what you need.”
He was referencing effective collaboration as a team, which is directly correlated to each individual’s self-awareness in the present moment.
Regardless of whether you’ve worked in the service industry, you can probably relate to this because the same concept also applies to other dimensions of your life.
Think about your romantic partner or best friend. The relationship is built around a mutual understanding of needs. It’s not necessarily that you’re each responsible for fulfilling them for each other, but they’re known and (to some extent) respected.
If you could create your own life from scratch, what would you need?
In other words, what is your “heaven on earth?”
Marshall Brain wrote a short book that illustrates the power of having an answer.
If you and I share the same needs, could we not live under the same roof—or in the same building, or neighborhood—and reasonably assume that we’d get along and have a great time together?
Do not confuse this question with a search for happiness; that’s an entirely different conversation. While satisfaction certainly plays a role, it’s not the core focus here…
This is about logistics, alignment, intention—a conscious endeavor to marry our shortcomings with infinite possibility.
Shadow Needs
If the pandemic of 2020 showed us anything, it showed us what we truly need.
The lockdowns, closures, travel restrictions, and government mandates that followed the March 16th announcement had culminated in a sequence of events the world has never seen. And as such, it was one of our first opportunities to collectively reflect on what we think we need vs. what we actually need.
We could still pump gas, pick up groceries, and go on hikes in the wilderness. Trucks continued to move products. Educators continued to teach. Doctors and nurses continued to work their medical magic. Mail still made it home and trash still got picked up from the curb every week.
All of sudden, what was essential revealed itself in the light of hardship.
We could still move money but didn’t need to go to the bank.
We could still learn but didn’t need to go to school.
Our shadow needs—what we thought we needed—were displaced by what we truly needed (i.e. realizing that we don’t actually need to work 40-hour work-weeks in a typical office environment).
If anything, this period was a sobering reflection of our inverted values.
Sports teams, concerts, and movie productions were all put on pause. And yet, athletes and celebrities are all economically more valuable than teachers and doctors.
Sometimes the shadows are dispelled in the face of a tough wake-up call, through forces outside of our control.
Other times we learn about our needs through self-selected experiences…
One experience that clarified my needs was living in a car for three months. I realized how much water I didn’t need when I had to start brushing my teeth using only the water that was left in my Hydroflask.
It wasn’t until I had to live out of a suitcase for ten months that I realized how much stuff I don’t need. The clothes, the gadgets, the furniture… all of this was extra. Dispensible fluff that took up space not just physically but mentally and emotionally, too.
And I didn’t know how much I needed real grass under my feet until I had lived in the desert for five years.
Some studies suggest that an annual income of $250k is the point of diminishing returns when it comes to money’s influence on happiness. If this is in fact true, why do so many people feel the need to make more?
In 2018, on the cusp of Bitcoin’s explosion, I got a call from a college buddy. He had finally reaped the rewards he’d long been awaiting, yet his accomplishment was anti-climatic or, at best, short-lived.
“My whole life, I’ve only been focused on one thing: becoming a millionaire… Now that I’ve accomplished that, I really don’t know what to do.”
He explained the bittersweet turmoil he’d been trudging through. Tony Robbins calls this “achievement without fulfillment.”
I call it a shadow need.
Is it possible that my friend had fallen victim to chasing hollow goals? How had that affected his life in the years leading up to his big accomplishment?
How many times did he opt for work instead of play; for salary instead of passion; for obligation instead of purpose?
Without knowing our needs, we’re stuck chasing our tails.
Living life by design is a pivotal change we’re all capable of making; something Greg McKeown explains in Essentialism. And if we can do this at the individual level, it rolls up to a greater and greater scale.
Can you think of a time you've gotten exactly what you thought you needed only to find out you didn’t actually need it?
Take social media, for example...
Do we really need more likes and followers, or is this a scapegoat for social approval so we can validate that we’re good enough? What if we concluded that the real need was genuine human connection? Would that change how we use social media platforms? How we build them, perhaps, or what we spend on them?
The Malleable Nature of Needs
Needs are ever-shifting. They’re dynamic, flexible, adaptable. Even if we know our true needs, they change fast and often.
Some of the first communities gathered around a need for common resources like food, water, and shelter.
In the 21st century, it doesn’t seem too farfetched to think that medicine, education, and internet are equally important for a thriving community.
We can think about the malleable nature of needs in a hierarchal way or in a contextual way.
Bezos built Amazon on the back of convenience because he knew it was a core need, particularly in modernized cities.
If you've ever lost your phone for more than a few days, you'd know that the painful part isn’t actually the loss of the device itself but rather what the device enables you to do.
You can’t call an Uber, find new restaurants on Yelp, or get directions to anything. Not to mention the seemingly impossible task of getting past 2FAs to log into your accounts.
It’s not that you can’t do anything, you just can’t do it conveniently.
Do we need an app and account for everything we do, or do we just need a way to do things conveniently?
It’s not the device we need, per se, but rather the access to our interconnected world. We need our data and an easy, familiar way to manipulate it. The smartphone is one solution but it’s not the only one.
With the real needs in the spotlight, the shadow fades and the focus can shift from annual hardware upgrades to more innovative solutions like BCI or ubiquitous touch-enabled surfaces.
The Role of Needs
Our behavior—what we do and how we live—is the substance of our daily life. It’s both a product and a reflection of our needs.
As our needs change, so does our behavior.
What were thought to be trends piggybacking on the madness of 2020 have now become an entirely new direction for businesses and consumers.
For example, remote woke has become a permanent option in many companies.
And Airbnb recently published an update that reorient’s its search interface to focus on types of stays instead of on dates or location. They didn’t do this because of a great idea spawned at a hackathon. They did it to meet the changing needs of its users.
In his book, Let My People Go Surfing, Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard says “We want customers who need our clothing, not just desire it.”
The company built its products by first understanding the core needs of those who would be buying them. Thus the company was governed by the needs of the people it served, not by the wants of those running it.
What if cities were built the same way?
The more open and visible our needs, the more we’re able to connect with each other in aligned ways.
We’re starting to see how this looks on a communal level with the emergence of DAOs, where people volunteer to organize around common wants and needs and work towards a shared vision of the future.
However, as with many group structures, DAOs cannot avoid wrestling with alignment and incentives, which seems to be more prevalent as the group matures.
When it comes to deliberating such topics through group consensus, where echo chambers and unscrutinized opinions collide, it may be helpful to acknowledge our shortcomings and tag in better solutions.
Mindvalley, for instance, has been experimenting with a match-making tool for professionals called E.V.E. that makes introductions based on an analysis of people’s wants and needs.
The individual defines the needs but doesn’t necessarily define the solution.
Take that same concept at a greater scale, where the simple element of a need or want is readily available to some mechanism that’s capable of effective aggregation that leads to perfect alignment.
Matchmaker heaven.
But not just for romances or professional relationships. The fruits of such a solution will fall into every aspect of our life, from travel to sports, hiring to firing, production, sales, supply chain and more.
This is all based on our ability to truly define and communicate our needs, then find opportunities to gather around them.
When we know what we need, we can build cities from the bottom-up based on what we truly want rather than top-down based on the desires of purported leaders. Cities that are dynamic and flexible; that embrace the pervading truth of impermanence. And most importantly, cities governed by aligned incentives that leave no room for the unessential.